by R. D Rhodes
“Full crate of beers. Some bread and orange juice. You want a beer?”
“Nah, I don’t drink. I’ll take some of that orange juice though.”
I handed him the juice and threw the beers and bread back in the bin.
“This should last us a few days.” Harry smiled proudly. He carried a bag and I carried two. I couldn’t believe it had been so easy. A full bag of sandwiches, a full bag of fruit, a bunch of other goodies, and all for free.
We headed back up the driveway, around the building. I felt his pride at our somewhat ingenuity. But my God, what a waste. Half of those bins were full of edible food, bunged to landfill for a dent on a tin or a sell-by date. It was crazy. People would kill for this food. People were starving. The people that grew those bananas were probably starving.
Harry offered me first pick. I took the tuna as we turned through the car park, glancing back at the fools who were walking in to pay for their food. I bit into the sandwich and swashed it around my mouth. It was so juicy. No food tastes as good as the first meal in two days. Except maybe the first meal in three.
“How did you find out about that?” I asked.
“Oh, you learn these things. There’s waste everywhere in this country. It’s not that hard to find.”
I slowly devoured my sandwich knowing I had another three to go and a dessert of fruit as well. We joined back onto the busy motorway and traipsed along munching away. I felt glad for the night's cover as we reached the shops and went quickly into the train and bus stations. The buses only went to London. But there was a train to Glasgow at half three the next afternoon.
We walked along the street considering what to do.
“Want to find a park to sit and eat?” I said.
“Yeah. Good idea.”
It was a small town and we soon found a cycle track that we thought would probably run alongside a park somewhere. We followed it through a council estate and then past some big three-and four-bedroom houses in a more rural part of town, till we came to a decent-sized park. The dark shapes of bushes circled a pond in its middle, and beyond the pond I could make out some kind of a picnic shelter with a long high roof. I heard laugher and noticed distant figures moving about the shelter. It sounded like kids. Apart from them the park was empty, and felt safe, and very few cars passed by. We walked in and took a seat on the swings.
It was great to rest my legs. Harry swung back and forth while I cracked open a can of Pepsi. Beyond the see-saw and chute at the cluster of gorse bushes and trees to the right, there seemed to be some movement, but I told myself I was being paranoid and looked away out over the pond. It was still and tranquil under the low moonlight and a few ducks bobbed about the surface near the reeds growing high from its middle. Shapes moved along the water’s edge, and got bigger and bigger as they approached. Two guys and a girl, about fifteen or sixteen. They looked over at us. One of the guys was carrying a bottle.
“Hey guys, yous want a drink?”
I looked at Harry and he looked at me. “Nah, we’re alright, thanks.” I said.
But still they came closer, until they were ten yards away. “Aw c’mon, come and join us if you want,” one of the boys said, “We got plenty booze.”
“Where you guys from?” The girl asked.
We both hesitated. “Scotland.” Harry said at last. “We’re here for a holiday.”
“Aw, Scotland! C’mon, come and join us, just go around mate.” They said it friendly enough. They seemed friendly enough. Then they turned and headed out of the park and down the cycle track.
“You wanna go?” Harry asked.
“Not really. What about you?”
“Nah. Just stay here. When those kids have gone, we can maybe find somewhere to sleep for the night. You want another sandwich?”
I picked out the beef and mustard.
He took the tuna one for himself. “So we’ll get the three-thirty train tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Are you gonna tell me how you’re planning to get us on with no money?”
He smirked, chewed his sandwich, and swallowed. “Just wing it. You can usually sneak in the gates behind the person in front of you. You get about three seconds time limit at the barrier from when they put their ticket in the slot. If you go quickly straight in behind them, it should be fine. Remember though, you have to act natural. Always act natural. They only get suspicious if you act suspicious.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t look to the side. Don’t check the guards. Don’t look anywhere but straight ahead. Or look at the ground like everyone else.”
“Yeah, I heard you the first time. What about when we get on? Just hide in the toilet?”
“Yeah, or take separate seats in different places and pretend you’re asleep.”
“It’s a gamble.”
“I know, but what other choice do we have? It’ll be fine. Try not to worry.”
“HEY! YOU’RE STILL HERE?”
The same kids were walking back towards us, with an extra bag in one of their hands.
“C’mon, we’ll introduce you guys. What’r your names?” One of the boys persisted. Maybe they were just being kind, I could never tell. I looked at Harry and shrugged my shoulders. “They’re just kids.” I said. We got up and all walked together around the lake. Through the gaps in the trees on our right I could make out the long, flat manicured surface of a golf course.
“Hey, guys!” one of the boys addressed the crowd when we reached the shelter. He looked back at us and winked, “These are my pals, Sally and Bob.”
Chapter 28
T here was about ten kids sitting on the bench and they looked at us all at once. At least half of the eyes widened when they saw Harry.
“Woah! What happened to your face?” one of them said.
Harry’s hand went up to his swollen mouth. Every gaze was on him in the dim half-light. “I was in a fight.” he smiled his yellow-toothed smile.
“That guy is one ugly bastard.” I thought I heard one of the kids comment to his mate next to him, a little too loudly, on the far side of the bench.
A couple of others said “Hi!” to us, and they all quickly lost interest and fell back into their discussions. One guy in the middle brought out a boom box and turned up Rihanna. There was plenty space on the bench between the two concrete walls and I sat down between two girls. A bottle of vodka was passed down the line. When it reached the girl on my right, she held it over a plastic bottle of what looked like orange juice and poured the vodka in till the orange juice reached the cap. She turned to me and held out the vodka bottle. Her eyes were already glassy. “You want a drink, mate?”
“I’m alright, thanks.” I said.
“Here, Megan, you want a drink?”
“Yeah, gimmie a drink!”
The girl leaned across me and handed Megan the bottle.
Harry sat a couple of places further up, talking to someone. A girl and a guy stood up and walked hand in hand into the darkness beyond the golf course.
“FUCKIN YESSS!” someone shouted. A guy got up in front of the group, tipped a beer to his lips and downed it in one. All the kids cheered.
“LET’S GET THE PARTY STARTED!”
“FUCKING RIGHT!”
“YEEAHH!”
“THAT’S GOOD SHIT.”
The music got turned up and some got up and danced to the dubstep, pumping their arms in the air. All around me they were downing shots, shaking their heads and screwing up their faces in disgust. I watched a nervy-looking girl dart her eyes about her, then throw back her head and down the remainder of her bottle.
A bunch of new guys appeared, each with massive white bags that drooped from each hand. They stood in front of the crowd and shouted and roared and parted the handles to unveil a vibrant selection of beer, alcopops, soors and wine. They started to hand them out.
“WOOO! LET’S GET FUCK-IN SMASHED! ” One of them shouted.
Another guy stood up with his trousers around his ankles and his tight ar
se on show in pink boxers. He waddled forward, shuffling his feet from side to side, until he reached the pond and with his back to us, relieved himself in the water.
What am I doing here? I thought. At first I had felt better being amongst the group, it had taken my mind away from everything. But I quickly got bored by it all and my thoughts returned to what might happen tomorrow. I looked out over the pond. The reeds came high above the guy pissing in it. The thought hit me that the police might come for under-age drinkers, but I knew it was highly unlikely. I tried to relax. Then someone whispered something in my ear.
I turned my head, “Sorry?”
It was the girl on my left that had been called Megan. Her eyes were rolling in her skull, her head tilted slightly, and she stared at me through distant and dilated pupils. All the time I had been there she had been sitting next to me silently sipping at her drink. Her head tilted further back, and she furrowed her brows at me.
“I said… where abouts you from?”
“Scotland.” I said, “What about yourself?”
Her eyes rolled down, then something seemed to process in her head. She looked back. “You’re from Scotland!”
“Yeah.”
Her interest was piqued, “I’ve always wanted to go to Scotland, since I was a little girl. I wanted to go up all those mountains and stuff and, oh man, I would love to climb Ben Nevis.”
“Orite” I said. “So why don’t you?”
She looked away to the right. A few kids had assembled around one guy who was doing card tricks. A chorus of appreciation went around the gathered crowd.
The girl looked back at me, then back at the card trick guy. It was like she hadn’t heard what I had said.
She looked back at me again. “What?”
“I said, why don’t you then?”
Her face paused in discomfort. “I don’t know. It’s hard to do that stuff on your own.”
“WOAH!”
“That’s nothing.” I heard Harry’s accent say. He got up and took the cards from the guy and faced the small crowd before him.
I asked Megan, “Will none of your friends go with you?”
She shook her head. She had a sad look in her eyes, “No. Nobody wants to go.” Then she leaned in close to me and lowered her voice. Her hot breath reeked of vodka, “I’m scared” she whispered, “that I’m gonna end up here forever.”
A round of applause clapped for Harry. He was holding a card face up between his long, piano fingers.
“HOW DID HE DO THAT?”
“Fuck, that was amazing.”
“Do it again.”
“It’s not that bad, is it?” I said to the girl. “What’s keeping you here? You can go anywhere you want. If you want to go to Scotland just jump on a bus, it’s not that expensive.”
Her eyes had dampened a little and the wetness in them glistened in the moonlight. “I know. I know.” she said quietly, “But I’ve wanted to go for years.” She put her mouth even closer to my ear, “I just can’t get the courage to go. I’m so bored here. This is all we ever do. Every. Single. Weekend. Just get drunk. All I do with my life is go to school all week, get pissed on Friday, get pissed on Saturday, then go back to school on Monday. It’s boring. I just want something else.”
“Well, the first step is the hardest. If you just get up and go, once you’re out of here and away, you will probably feel better.”
She took a sip of her drink. “I can’t. I’m going to end up here forever.”
“Well, only you can change that.”
She rubbed her temple and squeezed her eyes. She looked out over the pond.
“I know. But there’s just so much pressure. My dad wants me to be a doctor. My parents put all this stress on me to get good grades and stuff, and it’s hard, it’s a lot of pressure. Sometimes I’m lucky because a lot of the exams I find easy, they’re just memory tests and I have a decent memory, but it’s the pressure of the exam themselves that gets to me. When you’re sitting in your chair in the hall and you feel like this will shape your whole life. It’s like there’s a judge standing above me sometimes, analyzing my every move. Does that make sense?”
I nodded.
“It’s not fair. I panicked in the last one and I failed. I knew the answers, they were all in my head, but I couldn’t get it from my head to the paper quick enough. It’s just rush, rush, rush. And the examiner is parading the hall going fifteen minutes, ten minutes, five minutes, it’s like it’s a final countdown to my destiny. And they take marks off if you write too fast and end up scribbling. I don’t know what they want from me!” She took another hit, “But yeah, I failed. And now my parents make me study for three hours every night after school. I have to work on Saturdays during the day because they want me to learn about the importance of money. So I only get one free day a week, on Sunday. So when can I get the time to go?”
I was startled by her sudden outpour of emotion. She had obviously needed to get it off her chest for some time. “What about the summer holidays?” I suggested.
She sighed. “Yeah, that would be good. If they’ll let me.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Fifteen.”
“Do you know what? Fuck what your parents say. You should do what you want to do.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
A smile came over her face, then faded away almost as soon as it had come. “I’ve always wanted to play tennis, and I’m good at it. I did it right up till I was thirteen.”
“I love tennis too.” I said. “Why’d you stop?”
“My parents made me give it up. It was on a Saturday. My dad made me take the new job instead.”
“WOW!”
“HOW THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT?”
I glanced back at Harry, and his wide smile. His black eyes were sparkling with cunning and happiness. With his jeans and his blue, reasonably well-fitting jumper, and the black scarf, he actually looked quite smart. The eight kids around him didn’t care about his rats face and all his cuts anymore, and were giving him high fives and applauding wildly.
“What do your parents do?” I asked Megan.
“My mum works in an office and my dad works in a bank.”
I might have known. Fatalists, I thought. “You got any brothers or sisters?”
“Just one brother.” she said.
“And is he the same?
“Well, not really, his grades are far worse than mine. But they still let him go to football training twice a week and play games on Saturday.”
“AW-OH! HERE SHE IS!”
Two girls were striding towards us from the side of the pond. They both had on tiny, matching denim skirts with their long bronzed legs on show. One girl had blonde hair and the other jet black, but both hairstyles were straightened and shining and swishing and bouncing back and forth like girls in a L’Oréal advert. Their tight little t-shirts revealed quite a lot. It was about two degrees. And I had complained about the cold.
“Legend!” Someone shouted.
The blonde one smiled.
“Your mum let you out already?”
The blonde girl laughed. “She didn’t have a fucking choice.”
I turned to Megan. “What happened to her? What did she do?”
“Oh. Got her stomach pumped last week. Downed a litre of vodka.”
There was nothing to her, she was all skin and bone and chest and legs. “Is she suicidal or something?”
Megan shrugged as if it was no big deal.
The L’Oréal girls stood before everyone, in the middle of the shelter. The guys snuck peeks at them and the other girls exchanged jealous and pissed-off glances.
“Give me a drink!” the blonde one screeched.
“Way-hay!” a guy shouted. He handed her a bottle of schnapps. She held it bottom-up and I watched the pulse of her throat as she gulped it down.
“WAY HAAAYY!”
She smashed the bottle to the ground and smiled and raised her hands in the
air.
“That girl can drink.” someone said.
“Sure can.”
“I wish I could drink like that.”
“Your little sister can handle a drink more than you can, Bobby.”
A few people laughed.
“No, she can’t. Fuck off!”
The atmosphere was picking up. Girls and guys coupled up and walked off to the golf course. More kids got up and danced. The screams got louder. The noise got louder. Girls screeched and guys roared. The shelter was full to bursting and the kids who couldn’t fit in were standing around outside. The music was jacked up high and Kesha was belting out Party don’t stop.
Harry emerged from the crowd and stood before me with a wicked smile and delight in his eyes. He had been playing cards about forty minutes. “You wanna get going?” he shouted.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
I picked up my bag and said goodbye to Megan, and repeated, “Do what you want to do. Fuck your parents.” I shook her hand and Harry and I walked away round the side of the pond.
“Look what I got.” He pulled out a small wad of notes and pound coins.
“You win all that!? How much is there?”
He counted it up and shoved it back in his pocket. “Fifty-one pound fifty. Not bad for a night’s work.”
“You little bastard. You not feel guilty?”
“Look at them, they’re only gonna spend it on drink. I won it fair anyway, and they enjoyed the show.”
“Where did you learn that, card tricks?”
“What do you think I did in solitary all the time? Played hopscotch?” he laughed. “And I’ve read all of Derren Brown’s books. Who was that you were speaking too?”
“Megan. Poor girl. It pisses me off.”
“What does?”
“Wait. Stop. Wait a second.” He stopped moving too and I tightened his scarf which was beginning to slip down. “Just how parents raise clones. They don’t want a human being to care for, they want a living, breathing replica of themselves. A puppet. I don’t understand it. Why would you want that?”
“Thanks.” Harry said. We walked past the trees on our left. “I dunno. They probably think they’ve failed in their lives somehow and feel the need to live it out through someone else. Or else they’re just bored.”